Editor’s Note: This is a very interesting video of a Canadian who moved to the island of Bali in the Pacific Ocean and opened a “Green School”, as he was concerned about the future of the world after viewing a film that painted a very bleak picture regarding our ability to sustain our ecosystems and economic systems in the future.
Maybe we should be looking at something like this in Guyana … OH! OH!, I almost forgot, we already have ecologically balanced environments. The Amerindians are living like this daily… we can learn from them! .. ...Cyril Bryan, Editor
********
My Green School Dream
About this talk
Join John Hardy on a tour of the Green School, his off-the-grid school in Bali that teaches kids how to build, garden, create (and get into college). The centerpiece of campus is the spiraling Heart of School, perhaps the world’s largest freestanding bamboo building.
About John Hardy
Jewelry designer John Hardy co-founded the extraordinary Green School in Bali, where kids get a holistic and green education.
After selling his jewelry company in 2007, John Hardy and his wife, Cynthia, endowed a thrilling new project: the Green School in Bali. At the Green School, kids learn in open-air classrooms surrounded by acres of gardens that they tend; they learn to build with bamboo; and meanwhile they’re being prepared for traditional British school exams. The school is international — 20 percent of students are Bali locals, some on scholarship. The centerpiece of the campus is the spiraling Heart of School, which may be called Asia’s largest bamboo building.
Hardy has long been an advocate of the use of bamboo as an alternative to timber for building and reforestation. When running his company, Hardy pioneered a program of sustainable advertising that offset the carbon emissions associated with the yearly corporate print advertising by planting bamboo on the island of Nusa Penida in a cooperative plantation.
“Green School Bali [is] one of the most amazing schools on earth.” Stefan Sagmeister
video
Comments
What this person is doing in Bali is wonderful. I also agree with Mr. Bryan that the Amerindians in Guyana have been living the green life forever.
Maybe we can add to our Umana Yana if there is adequate space available. Raised buildings like these school buildings would look very beautiful and impressive!!
I would like to know just how long the bamboo support columns for these buildings are expected to last? As we all know, even concrete and steel columns deteriorate with age. So I’m wondering about the life time of these green buildings.
There is ,however, the up side of this…bamboo grows so quickly and abundantly that you should not run out of building materials. And it also means that every time you rebuild you can change your design if you so care!! And because it is not one extra long building like so many of our present day “marvels” of concrete, steel and glass buildings, you can re-build one section at at time without having to close down the entire complex. Thus classes, as in this case, can continue uninterrupted.
Maybe we should push to have the governments of Guyana and Bali to “twin” our respective countries, or at least the two areas ?
Guyana is a USELESS CAUSE as a result of CORRUPT and INCOMPETENT individuals that make up the Government, specifically those involved in GoInvest, the Agriculture Minister (Persaud) and the president (purposely a lowercase p) himself (Jagdeo). They were offered and could have already established as having the leading R&D company in green technology (Treefree Biomass Solutions, Inc http://www.TreeFreeBiomassSolutions.com) doing most of their R&D there and making Guyana the breadbasket for the crop used for all their green technology. This would have saved the economy via the agriculture sector and the ancillary industries that would flourish that use the crop. They are however so focused on their drug trade dealings, that legitimate business ventures are ignored/unwanted. I do not see anything changing with elections on the way … just more of the same … CORRUPTION and INCOMPETENCE.
Mr. Seenandan, don’t give up hope. And don’t give up on Guyana.
I’m thinking that you must be a Guyanese who has loved and still loves, your country deeply and is hurting by what you are seeing now. Would you have ever thought that the huge Russian empire would bend and allow it’s satellite states to become independent ? Did you ever think that the WALL between East and West Germany would ever have been demolished? Did you ever think that there would one day be a Black President in the United States? Yet these things all came to past. True they didn’t happen overnight. These things never do. But water cuts a path through the hardest rock ( witness the Grand Canyon in the USA and countless other such examples around the world.)
If the youth of Guyana see the need for change they can achieve it. If they really want it they will achieve it. But it have to be a concerted effort. Right now the country is still divided as it has been since before Independence. When our “peoples” open their eyes and awaken to the fact that we just cannot continue fighting each other, then we would have taken the first steps to maturity. We are all the product of history. Until then unfortunately individuals who take on the fight for unity and progress for Guyana will feel that it is a hopeless cause. And will be tempted to give up. Hopefully such persons will continue the fight for the future of beautiful Guyana.
So Mr. Seenandan, please do not give up on Guyana but instead do what you can to keep the hope alive!
( By the way are you related to Mr. Brian Seenandan, a director of TreeFreeBioMass Solutions? Just wondering, not drawing any conclusions.)